Apollo exhibit touches down at Museum of Flight

The folks at the Museum of Flight have done their level best to make their new Apollo exhibit that opened last weekend all about the people who made the Moon landings happen. But there’s no doubt that two enormous F-1 engines that launched people to the Moon dominate the gallery. One is an unused engine that towers 18 feet tall above the exhibit and weighs nine tons. The other is mangled parts of engines from Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 that flew to space, did belly flops from 40 miles above the Atlantic Ocean, and then spent more than forty years some three miles deep before being found and recovered by Bezos Expeditions.

Geoff Nunn, adjunct curator for space
history at the Museum of Flight, explains
 that the Apollo F-1 engines are really,
really big. (Photo: Greg Scheiderer)

The exhibit has been a couple of years in the making. Planning started with the opening of the museum’s Charles Simonyi Space Gallery the the acquisition of the Space Shuttle Trainer that is the centerpiece of that gallery. That moved the shuttle, post-shuttle, and looking to the future exhibits across the street, and gave museum staff the opportunity to create a new exhibit that focuses on the beginning of modern rocketry, the space race, the Moon landings, and the post-Apollo 1970s.

Geoff Nunn, adjunct curator for space history at the museum, said they had several objectives for the exhibit.

“We wanted to showcase the tremendous artifacts,” Nunn said at a press preview of Apollo. “We wanted to reintegrate the Pete Conrad collection into the broader story of the space race and the Moon landings. We wanted to showcase these incredible, one-of-a-kind artifacts that have been through so much in their life—through fire and, in the case of the Apollo 12 engines, lightning, and then impact with the sea floor and 40 years deep, deep under water.”

Indeed, the two Apollo engines provide an amazing before and after comparison, and there are other great artifacts on display. The exhibit also features:

• A production version of the Apollo command module that was used for training
• An engineering mockup of a lunar rover, built by Boeing in Kent
• A mockup of the Apollo 17 lunar module ascent stage
• A Viking Mars lander

The museum has a lot of artifacts from astronaut Pete Conrad, the Apollo 12 commander. Among those on display are a cuff checklist Conrad used to keep track of tasks on the Moon, a mix tape he played on Skylab that includes personal messages from the likes of Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, and Tom T. Hall, and a rock Conrad brought back from the Moon.

David Concannon is the deep sea explorer hired by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to lead the search for and discovery of the F-1 engines. (See our story from November 2015 for more.) Concannon, who has also recovered artifacts from the Titanic, was still in awe at the press preview last week.

“These engines tell an magnificent story of a time in America when everybody came together, pulled together to do something magnificent,” Concannon said. “To me, that’s the story that these beat-up, burned-up artifacts tell.”

They tell it remarkably well. Don’t miss it!

Mars "big thinkers" envision people on the Red Planet

After hearing about the pros, cons, and challenges of sending people to Mars, most of the audience who attended “National Geographic: Mankind to Mars” at Benaroya Hall Monday evening decided that such an effort would be worthwhile. A significantly smaller percentage of attendees would be willing to make the trip themselves.

The straw poll by applause came after a panel discussion moderated by Andrew Fazekas, also known as The Night Sky Guy, a space journalist who writes a column for National Geographic and who is the author of Star Trek; The Official Guide to Our Universe: The True Science Behind the Starship Voyages (National Geographic, 2016). The other panelists were Jedidah Isler, an astrophysicist from Vanderbilt University, and Ray Arvidson, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who has had a hand in Mars missions going back to Viking in the 1970s and is the deputy principal investigator for the Mars rover Opportunity mission.

Why Mars?

Fazekas said he got interested in space when he was a little kid and his father showed him Mars through a telescope.

“Mars has always been particularly fascinating to humankind because it’s our nearest neighbor,” Fazekas said, “a neighboring world that beckons us.”

(L-R) Andrew Fazekas, Jedidah Isler, and Ray Arvidson
discuss “Mankind to Mars” May 15, 2017 at
Benaroya Hall in Seattle. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

The presentation made liberal use of video clips and images from the Mars miniseries aired by the National Geographic Channel last fall. The panelists covered a wide range of topics, including the history of Mars, its past possible habitability, research by rovers and orbiters at Mars and by people on Earth, rocket and spacecraft design, private space ventures, and the possible setup for a human outpost on Mars.

They also discussed a litany of challenges to making a successful human mission to Mars happen, including getting there and landing safely, radiation, dust, fuel and power, agriculture on Mars, and a host of threats to human physical, mental, and emotional health.

Isler said she’s interested in the “socio-technological” aspects of a human mission to Mars, and thinks interest is building because we keep learning.

“It seems like a good amount of information is there, we’ve got a lot of poepole interested in it,” she noted. “I think it’s just a good time because we’ve got all the right pieces, or many of them.”

There’s also important science to be done, Arvidson said.

“What we’re looking at on Mars is the record in the rocks that’s long lost on Earth,” he said. “It’s the first billion years of geologic time. Earth is very active; Mars was active early but then kind of slowed down, so the rock record is still preserved. That’s the period of time when life got started and evolved on Earth. It may have also gotten started and evolved on Mars.”

Where to land

Scientists are debating right now about possible human landing sites on Mars, and dozens of them have been proposed by people with varying scientific interests. Arvidson said it will take many years to whittle those down and make a choice. The target spot will have to be one that is safe to land on, away from the poles and at low elevation so it is not too cold, and will need to offer a balance between science, safety, and sustainability.

“Wherever we go, there are lots of questions about early Mars and habitability and life,” Arvidson said. “I think the first human expedition site will be a science station, most likely, for detailed exploration between humans and robotic systems.”

Isler said that machines will do a lot of work, but that people are essential for the ultimate success of a Mars mission.

“Robots are beneficial, but they are limited,” she said. “You will always want, I argue, the dynamism, the spontaneity of human beings.”

When shall we start packing?

“Depending on what we want to do, nationally and internationally, where the finances are, and what the reasons are and the justification, we can do this in the next few decades,” Arvidson said, speculating that we’ll arrive on Mars in the 2040s. Isler thinks it will take longer than that to figure out the human factors involved.

“The rumor on the street is that we’re always 20 years from Mars,” she quipped.

The panel speculated about an “Armstrong moment” on the day that a person from Earth sets foot on Mars for the first time. Isler said it will be a “moment where people will be be super connected with the fact that we as a species have now moved ourselves to this place successfully.”

But she added that we need to be careful how we talk about the endeavor, as huge numbers of people have been thinking about and working on getting humans to Mars for years.

“We have to do a better job this time around of implying and also asserting that it wasn’t just one person, this was not rugged individualism,” Isler said. “This is a team effort.”

She also thinks it will go a bit differently than Neil Armstrong’s line after stepping onto the Moon.
“When the first Mars explorer steps off she might Snapchat,” she laughed.

Fazekas seemed most optimistic about the timeline.

“If we put all of these components together—the technology, the science, the engineering, the willpower, understanding the challenges—we may one day all have a chance to become a tourist on Mars,” Fazekas said.

Further reading and viewing:

Mars Insider gives the scoop on Red Planet missions

To work for the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) it would probably be helpful if you had some juggling skills.

“At JPL we have 24 flying missions in deep space,” said spacecraft engineer Terry Himes, who has had a hand on most of those craft. Himes gave a talk titled “Mars Insider” recently at the Museum of Flight.

NASA JPL spacecraft engineer Terry Himes
spoke at the Museum of Flight April 29,
2017 about his work on various missions.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“Our job as spacecraft engineers is to keep the health and welfare of the spacecraft,” Himes said, and that’s a job that doesn’t always line up with the science goals of the mission.

“The science guys want to go to the worst possible places on the planet,” Himes laughed. “They want to go to horrifying places and land in crevasses and do all kids of crazy stuff. We (engineers) want to land on flat, sandy plains.”

Thus choosing a place to land is a battle from day one and can often be a lengthy discussion, Himes said. For the Mars Science Lab Curiosity, for example, the science team wanted to land as close as possible to Mount Sharp on Mars so they could explore the geology there. They were able to land in a tight spot by using the controlled descent of Curiosity’s incredible landing method. Himes noted that the target landing area for Mars missions, known as the “landing ellipse,” has been shrinking over the years. While Viking had a landing ellipse 300 kilometers long, they dropped Curiosity into a target of just 18 kilometers.

“It’s like hitting a golf ball in San Diego and making a hole-in-one in New York,” Himes said.

Once a lander is on the ground there’s another daily discussion about what it will do next. This is typically based on photos sent back from the activities of the previous sol, or Martian day. They consider interesting nearby objects, any hazards in the area, and the overall health of the rover. Himes noted that Curiosity’s wheels have taken a beating from hard and sharp rocks on Mars. He also related a funny story about the wheels.

A message in the sand

NASA had told the spacecraft team that they couldn’t put a logo or any other mention of JPL on Curiosity because the project involved all of NASA and scientists from other countries, too. They got around that by putting cutout grooves in the wheels that are Morse code for the letters, so that every time those wheels turn they leave J-P-L in the Martian sand.

“Don’t mess with engineers,” Himes laughed.

A little InSight about Mars

The next project for Himes will be InSight, which after a recent delay is now scheduled to launch next May and land on Mars in November of 2018. InSight, which is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, will help us figure out how rocky planets form and evolve. The craft will be a modified version of Phoenix, another mission Himes worked on, which found ice near the north pole of Mars in 2008. InSight will have a couple of new instruments.

This artist’s concept depicts the InSight lander on Mars
after the lander’s robotic arm has deployed a seismometer
and a heat probe directly onto the ground. InSight is the
first mission dedicated to investigating the deep interior
 of Mars. The findings will advance understanding of
how all rocky planets, including Earth, formed
and evolved. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The first is the Heat flow and Physical Properties Probe, or HP³, which Himes says they’re calling simply “The Mole.”

“It’s a heat transfer mechanism,” Himes said. “We’re going to go into the surface of Mars and conduct heat experiments, see how much heat is there.” The mole will be driven some five meters into the ground on Mars.

The other instrument is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or SEIS, a “very broad band” seismometer sensitive enough to detect meteor strikes way on the other side of the planet. These two instruments will give scientists information about the inner workings of Mars.

There are a couple more Mars missions on the drawing board. Mars 2020 will be a lander much like Curiosity—NASA can save some cash by re-using spacecraft designs if they can serve the purpose—and it will look for signs of past microbial life on Mars, explore the possibility for creating oxygen in the Red Planet’s atmosphere, and do a variety of other experiments.

NeMO, the “next Mars orbiter,” will provide another communication link should a current orbiter fail, and it also could be part of a plan to return pieces of Mars to Earth.

“Mars 2020 may be depositing samples that it gathers in canisters and leaving them around,” Himes said, “and then NeMO may have something that’s going to go down to the surface, pick them up, and come back, and return to Earth.” Himes noted that plans for NeMO are still quite preliminary.

As these missions are developed it seems likely that Himes will be in the middle of it all.

Meeting the Martians and getting snapshots of far-away planets

It’s possible that some extraterrestrials were at the most recent Astronomy on Tap Seattle gathering, at which we explored the possibility of life on Mars and looked at exciting new techniques for capturing images of exoplanets.

We have met the Martians and they are us—maybe

“Are we all Martian-Americans? We still don’t know,” said Bob Abel, a professor of applied physics at Olympic College and collaborator with the University of Washington’s Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Group. Abel gave a talk titled, “Where Are the Martians?” at Astronomy on Tap Seattle April 26.

Giving a quick geological and topographical history of Mars, Abel said that the Red Planet is just one-half the diameter of Earth, and thus has just one-eighth the volume of Earth, so Mars cooled off pretty quickly.

Curiosity shot this image in Gale Crater on Mars. The mudstones
indicate a long history of standing water in that location. Photo: NASA.

“During the early formation of the solar system, it would have cooled to the point where liquid water could exist on its surface before the Earth got to that point,” Abel said, adding that it’s clear that water was once abundant on Mars. The rovers Spirit and Curiosity both landed in craters that used to be lakes, and Opportunity set down on the edge of what scientists think was once a salty sea.

In addition, Abel said that Spirit found opaline silica in Gusev Crater on Mars.

“The place where you find this on Earth is near geysers and hydrothermal vents,” Abel said. You’ll find heat, water, and minerals around these vents. “You’ve got all the stuff for life, and you find the most primitive life clustered around these on Earth.”

Prof. Bob Abel of Olympic College
gave a talk about Mars and Martians
 at Astronomy on Tap Seattle April
26, 2017. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

The surface of Mars is awfully barren now, but life could have conceivably existed there in the distant past. Scientists have found meteorites from Mars on Earth, and inside some of those meteorites they’ve found structures that look like nanobacteria. The debate continues over whether these are biological or not.

“It’s still somewhat up in the air, but it’s tantalizing evidence,” Abel said. “The question still remains, did life start earlier on Mars, since it was capable of being inhabited? And by the time Earth was habitable, did meteorites come to Earth and start life on Earth?”

The investigation continues.

As for present-day Mars, while the surface appears devoid of life, we may find something if we dig a little deeper. Abel said that Curiosity detects occasional outbursts of methane on Mars. He pointed out that most methane on Earth is created by biology.

“I’m personally rooting for flatulence, but we don’t know yet what’s causing it,” he laughed. But, through measurements made by many different Mars orbiters, we’ve learned that the planet’s outer core is molten. So beneath the surface there is heat, water, hydrocarbons, and soil: everything life wants. Abel recalled a talk last year by Penelope Boston, head of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

“She can’t see how life doesn’t exist below the surface of Mars,” Abel said.

Snapshots of exoplanets

Getting photographs of exoplanets—planets orbiting far-away stars—is a relatively new field within astronomy. The first such images were captured just eight years ago or so. Benjamin Gerard said the technology and capabilities within the field are advancing rapidly. Gerard, a doctoral student in physics and astronomy at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, uses the Gemini Planet Imager to trick out pictures of planets near stars that are many light years away. These photos can be useful for figuring out the components of a planet’s atmosphere and whether it has oceans and continents.

Doctoral student Benjamin Gerard gave
a talk about his work imaging exoplanets
at Astronomy on Tap Seattle April 28.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Gerard said the main challenges in exoplanet imaging are resolution and contrast. He explained that the key to good resolution is adaptive optics. If you’ve looked through a telescope you have likely had nights when the objects you observe appear to be wiggling around because of atmospheric turbulence. Gemini corrects for this with adaptive optics.
Light from the object hits a deformable mirror as well as a component called a wave-front sensor. The sensor measures the amount of turbulence, sends the information to the mirror’s actuators, which can correct for the aberration.

“The mirror deforms once every millisecond,” Gerard said. “This aberration gets corrected and is constantly re-focused onto the camera. Once it reaches that point this image that is very turbulent suddenly becomes much more stable and we can get much better resolution.”

Gerard said this is a plus for ground-based telescopes.

“With this technique, we can basically take a ten-meter telescope and make it like we were in space,” he said. “With adaptive optics we actually do better than any space telescope in resolution.”

The problem of contrast is apparent to anyone who has visited social media, which is full of bad-contrast photos. Especially common are pics of people posed in front of windows. Often the people appear as silhouettes because the light from the window is way brighter. While exoplanets don’t pose in front of cosmic windows, contrast is a huge problem when it comes to getting the images.

“A planet like Earth is about ten billion times dimmer than it’s host star,” Gerard pointed out. Using a coronagraph helps block out the light of the star and remove its glare from the image. They also use a technique called angular differential imaging to overcome aberrations within the instruments. This is a little bit counter-intuitive to the amateur astrophotographer who typically uses an instrument rotator during long exposures to compensate for the apparent motion of objects caused by the rotation of the Earth.

“For exoplanet imaging this is actually helpful, so we turn off the instrument rotator and the planet appears to rotate with respect to the view of the fixed telescope instrumental aberrations,” Gerard said. “We can distinguish one from the other.” Computer algorithms can later put images made in this way back together to create even greater contrast.

Gerard hopes they’ll be able to do even better in the near future. The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is scheduled to launch in the mid-2020s. It will have a deformable mirror that should have the capability to image smaller planets like Earth.

“This is many orders of magnitude better than we can do on ground-based telescopes, because on a space telescope you’re much more stable,” Gerard said. “On the Hubble Space Telescope now we can’t reach this sort of contrast because there is no deformable mirror.”

Since Gerard gave the talk NASA announced an independent review of WFIRST that could change its timeline and instrumentation.